“In 2016, 63,632 persons died of a drug overdose in the United States; 66.4% (42,249) involved an opioid.”

Why do I suspect that the CDC would be absolutely gleeful if reporters read only the first sentence and then wrote their same old crap? After all, it is much easier than actually reading the paper and seeing what’s really in there. But if you bother to read it it doesn’t take long until the funny business starts.

First, the authors state that there are (at least) two ways to count opioid deaths. And the CDC has been doing it wrong (emphasis mine):

Traditionally, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and others have included synthetic opioid deaths in estimates of “prescription” opioid deaths. However, with [fentanyl] likely being involved more recently, estimating prescription opioid–involved deaths with the inclusion of synthetic opioid– involved deaths could significantly inflate estimates.

Shocking! Except that I have written numerous pieces (1) which conclude exactly this: By combining fentanyl deaths with those from prescription drugs it automatically skews the results. The stats from the CDC have been BS all along. They are now sheepishly admitting it, but not until the BS numbers were already used to formulate the god-awful policy which is now plaguing millions of us. All based on a bunch of lies.

It doesn’t take long to find data in the article that makes the CDC and its flunkies (2) look pretty bad. Let’s start with Table 1. The center column (green circle and arrow) represents the “traditional” method that the CDC used to count deaths. Note that the number doubled between 2013 and 2016. Those damn pills are stone cold killers, just like we’ve been told all along, right? No. Not right.

The other columns tell us why. The left column (blue) represents the number of deaths when the “conservative definition” (make that “correct definition”) is used. The data in this column no longer includes deaths from “fentanyl” (“fentanyl” in this instance meaning illicit fentanyl and its analogs – synthesized in Chinese labs, not pharmaceutical fentanyl). Once “fentanyl” (red column) is removed from a category in which it should never have been in in the first place, all of a sudden, the number of deaths drops by half. That little “a” has a big meaning. This “a” explains why fentanyl is erroneously lumped in with the others.

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